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Updated Microsoft's Azure cloud is grappling with an "unexpected outage" in its SQL Reporting component.

The failure in the US East data-center hub began on Sunday night and meant the SQL Reporting Service suffered "service degradation" – a softie-euphemism for anything from intermittent connectivity to outright failure.

"We are aware of the service interruption affecting Azure SQL Reporting in the East US sub-region," a Microsoft spokeswoman told The Register on Monday morning, Pacific Time. "Our engineering team is currently working to restore the service to a fully operational state. We will be posting further details on the Windows Azure dashboard shortly."

The problem followed Microsoft slashing the price of cloudy SQL Reporting by 82 per cent on February 1 – a move seen by some as an admission that Redmond had been a little optimistic with its initial pricing.

Microsoft first reported the problems at 7:26am UTC on Monday (11:26pm Pacific on Sunday) and was still attempting to fix the cloud component at 5:52am Pacific, according to posts made to the Windows Azure Service Dashboard. There have been no further updates.

The outage follows various hiccups with Azure Compute in the US last week, and a worldwide failure of the Ajax CDN in January, 2013.

At the time of writing, Microsoft had not returned requests for further information. ®

Update

It could take days for the SQL Reporting Service to be fully restored, Microsoft wrote in a post to the Windows Azure Service Dashboard on Monday afternoon Pacific Time.

The company recommended that any affected customers re-deploy their services to other sub-regions, and published a step-by-step guide for how to do this on the dashboard.

"We have determined that the incident is the result of a procedural operations error and have begun full recovery," the company wrote. "We will be contacting affected customers directly to insure that they are aware of these steps."